Fibre channel (FC) storage area networks (SANs) may be configured to provide a network topology having a plurality of “fabrics.” Fabrics are comprised of one or more fibre channel switches that allow endpoint devices (“nodes”) connected to each other to communicate via the switched network. Within the fabric, the fibre channel switches are also connected to each other through inter-switch link cable connections between ports on a first switch to ports on a second switch. Multiple fabrics are used within typical SAN configurations to produce redundancy in case of failure of portions of the FC network, such as when inter-switch links are broken within the fabric or network communications are otherwise interrupted.
Storage management applications are used by storage administrators for many aspects of managing FC fabric configurations, including receiving alerts (such as by sending automatic emails) when fabric events occur. Examples of fabric events that the administrator may receive alerts for include: when the endpoint on a fabric has gone missing; when the endpoint on a fabric has been discovered or re-discovered; when a new zone has been created in a fabric's zoning database; and when an existing zone has been removed from a fabric's zoning database.
Some storage resource management products, such as IBM TIVOLI® Storage Productivity Center, allow users to create an alert definition whose scope is for one or more fabrics selected from a larger set of fabrics. For example, the Administrator could define an alert definition such as to receive alerts when any endpoint on Fabric 100000051E34AE1C has gone missing. Rather than needing to run and analyze reports, the user may look at the alert log to easily determine what is happening in the fabric in real-time.
A fabric, however, is simply a logical entity—a collection of connected fibre channel switches. The set of switches within a fabric can change. A fabric can split or become segmented. Two fabrics can merge. A switch from one fabric can be moved to another fabric. As a further complexity, the world wide name (WWN) of the principal switch of a fabric is commonly used as the unique identifier of the fabric in FC networks by storage resource management products. Thus, when the principal switch of the fabric changes, the unique identifier for the fabric is changed.
Because the set of switches in a fabric and/or the identifier of the fabric may change, the Storage Administrator may have previously configured an alert definition for a fabric that becomes meaningless. For example, if the Storage Administrator had created an alert definition to receive alerts when any endpoint on Fabric 100000051E34AE1C has gone missing, and then the principal switch in the fabric changes, this causes the fabric identifier to change. The previous alert definition for Fabric 100000051E34AE1C will be configured to provide alerts for a fabric identifier that no longer exists. In this scenario, the Storage Administrator will no longer receive alerts when any endpoints go missing, even though the only change that occurred was a change of principal switch for the fabric.
There are no known solutions to comprehensively address the alert definition problems described above, except to prevent alert definitions from being selected and scoped by fabric. The various embodiments of the present invention address these problems by introducing multiple approaches to fabric monitoring and fabric alert changes.